Integrated planning and analysis tasks are needed for autonomous, i.e., unmanned, systems operation. Currently, several government agencies and private corporations perform planning and analysis tasks for such autonomous systems. Current space launch and satellite operations tasks include completing link-margin analyses for the launch vehicle and space vehicles to ensure successful receipt of telemetry. Telemetry is required for a broad range of vehicle command, control, navigation, mission specific operational communications, and health monitoring requirements. Effective planning requires the analysis of several factors, including time of day, duration of collection, data rates, and the specific user operations required for command and control of the space vehicle. These tasks require transforming specific orbital state vectors from one earth-centered astronomical reference frame to others; analyzing telemetry links for sources that are moving relative to collectors, e.g., antennas, that may be moving; and development of trajectory information to support collection feasibility for telemetry links being assessed. This comprises the plotting and generation of several collector attributes including antenna gain, phi angle (i.e., vehicle clock or roll angle), theta angle (i.e., line of sight angle), alpha angle (i.e., off bore sight angle of the antenna), azimuth and elevation.
Accomplishing these pre-launch tasks using currently available tools requires significant training for new users. Additionally, generating a comparison of post-flight data to pre-flight predicted data is a manual, time-intensive process. In addition to training, the current tools require engineering expertise and domain knowledge in mission planning, orbit analysis, link-margin analysis, and acquired experience through years of use in order to reliably interpret input data and results.
Current space launch and satellite early orbit analysis processes and tools do not integrate the type of capabilities required for flight operations. The operator must execute multiple steps in transferring data between tools for subsequent operations. The user must generate numerical tables of data, transfer them to separate plotting applications, and plot the information subject to the application's functionality and requirements. Due to the complexity of working with the existing tools and plotting applications, although reliable, errors can be easily introduced in the manual plotting of data or the analysis of collector attributes. Common problems include unit discrepancies, time-tag errors, and data format errors. The current time consuming pre-launch planning and analysis process limits the user's ability to run alternative scenarios necessary where only the trajectory or specification files change.
While the above focuses on space launch and early orbit analysis, many of these limiting factors hold true for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and other autonomous systems operations.